‘Keeper’ Review: All Along the Watchtower

Double Advantageous’s Keeper suggests a sport brought on by an acid journey. It’s a dialogue-less journey that begins with a crumbling lighthouse by a neon sea changing into sentient, sprouting insect legs, and waddling its approach down the countryside after a gawky seabird decides to make a nest on its roof. Some hours later, the lighthouse’s disembodied mild experiences full-on Terence McKenna-level ego demise because it communes with the planet. There are many video games with psychedelic visuals however few that really feel as totally dedicated to the bit as Keeper.

There’s a bigger fantastical story at play, however the onerous particulars are hidden in the descriptions of the achievements you earn throughout the sport. The aim is just for the lighthouse and its avian good friend to achieve their final perch at the prime of a looming mountain. Keeper is in any other case not an expertise that’s terribly eager on constructing a way of escalating issue or pressure.

Apart from strolling, the lighthouse can do exactly three issues: shine its mild, shine a brighter mild that impacts the setting, and ship its chook good friend to drag objects. The Keeper paints an impressively crafted world of summary watercolors—of bizarre little guys that vaguely resemble sea creatures, of clockwork villages stuffed with clockwork folks, of huge turtles carrying totally populated cities on their shells—and the builders at Double Advantageous are extra involved with you seeing all of it than they’re with ushering you towards the subsequent plot level.

With just a few exceptions, each impediment in the lighthouse’s approach may be dealt with simply by taking an in depth go searching at your environment. From the fixed-camera angles to the frequent self-contained little diorama areas you encounter alongside the journey, every part about the expertise appears tailor-made towards permitting gamers to easily soak in the copious, minute, and trippy particulars of this world, and look at them additional to seek out the options to the video games puzzles.

That makes for a somewhat mild journey, all issues thought of, although Keeper is sometimes negligent about signposting the subsequent step you’re presupposed to take so as to advance. That’s a specific drawback with the obstacles the place the solely factor you decide up from fixing a puzzle is just too small to see when the chook is nesting on the lighthouse.

The sport nonetheless will get numerous mileage out of the barebones mechanics at play, and most significantly, it encourages gamers to deal with each sq. inch of the world as doubtlessly interactive. Shining your mild on a bush would possibly reveal the answer to a puzzle, or it would simply trigger a brand new plant to develop or the little animal inside to come back out and squeak a good day.

Keeper is, in the end, only a lengthy, linear stroll, banking on its meticulously weird sport world to enthrall gamers to maintain stepping ahead, and it’s very a lot profitable at that. It’s time effectively spent—should you can keep in mind what time even is in an altered state.

This sport was reviewed with code supplied by Meeting Inc. Slant Journal stands in solidarity with the ongoing BDS boycott of Microsoft gaming merchandise. No hyperlinks will probably be posted which offer further income to Microsoft straight.